One racist act. It's all it takes.
Once we were slaves to haramu-fal. Once we were breed by men solely to give our bodies to other men. We have seen how the woman becomes the enslaved. Let us now show them how the enslaved becomes a le...
Obama’s greatest misstep was born directly out of his greatest insight. Only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and thus could sincerely trust white America, could be so ce...
Indeed, they felt it their duty to disabuse me of my weaponized history. They had seen so many Malcolmites before and were ready. Their method was rough and direct. Did black skin really convey nobili...
I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I tell you n...
I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else's chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that withi...
I am so very proud of you — your openness, your ambition, your aggression, your intelligence. My job, in the little time we have left together, is to match that intelligence with wisdom. Part of that...
Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s r...
Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor - it is not so easy to...
Have you ever taken a hard look at those pictures from the sit-ins in the ’60s, a hard, serious look? Have you ever looked at the faces? The faces are neither angry, nor sad, nor joyous. They betray a...
Good intention is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
For realists, the true story of the Civil War illuminates the problem of ostensibly sober-minded compromise with powerful, and intractable, evil.
Five years later, 750,000 Americans were dead. But the fact that such carnage had been wreaked for a cause that Ulysses S. Grant called one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for whi...
Educated children walked in single file on the right side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the lavatory, and carried the lavatory pass when en route. Educated children never offered excuses—c...
But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know.
Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who...
The Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.
Racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this.
People who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantasti...
You can’t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position, he said. The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then start...